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Women at Full Throttle

BY BARBARA VIGILANTE

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A History of
Determination

Minority CPAs have come a long
way, but true diversity has yet to be achieved.

BY PHAEDRA BROTHERTON

I n the professions early
years, despite being highly educated, CPAs of color
faced challenges in meeting the professions
experience requirements and in practicing
accountancy. For most of the twentieth century,
virtually no whites would hire and train an African
American to become a CPA, justifying this by
claiming that clients would not tolerate an African
Americans involvement in their financial affairs,
says Theresa A. Hammond in her book A
White-Collar Profession: African American
Certified Public Accountants since 1921
(University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

For
example, John Cromwell, the first black CPA,
graduated with honors from Dartmouth College and
earned a masters degree but chose to teach high
school math because of limited practice
opportunities. Ultimately, in 1930 he became
controller of Howard University.

Through the 1930s, 40s and 50s, as the number of
black CPAs grew slowly, they provided younger
African Americans with opportunities to gain
experience to sit for the CPA exam as well as
practice accountancy. Arthur J. Wilson, the second
African American CPA and the first in Illinois,
gave that chance to many in Chicago, including
Mary T. Washington, the first African American
woman CPA, who eventually owned her own accounting
practice (see her obituary
).

Mary T. Washington, who
became the first female African American
CPA in 1943, died this past summer, less
than a year away from her own 100th
birthday. Early in her career, she
worked as the assistant to Arthur J.
Wilson, the countrys second African
American CPA, at Binga State Bank of
Chicago, one of the countrys largest
African-American-owned banks. Wilson
encouraged her to pursue a business
degree at Northwestern University and
helped her obtain the experience needed
to become a CPA.

Washington
opened her own accounting firm in 1939,
largely serving small black-owned
companies. Many white-owned firms would
not hire blacks, and she is credited
with giving numerous aspiring African
American accountants the chance to meet
the experience requirement for becoming
CPAs. She soon built a thriving business
serving Chicagos large black middle
class. Her firm, which ultimately became
Washington, Pittman, and McKeever, grew
into one of the largest black-owned CPA
firms in the country. Clients included
Fuller Products and (early in his
career) Muhammad Ali, as well as the
city of Chicago, the Chicago Public
Library and the Chicago Housing
Authority. Washington retired in 1985.

Source: A White-Collar
Profession: African American Certified
Public Accountants since 1921
(University of North Carolina Press,
2002) by Theresa Hammond.

After
Franklin D. Roosevelts administration barred
discrimination in federal government and federal
contractor employment, some of its members met
with Jesse Blayton, Georgias first black CPA and
a Morehouse College professor who had established
the colleges business department, to discuss New
Deal programs from an African American
perspective. Known as the dean of Negro
accountants through his role as chair of Atlanta
Universitys accounting department and his
position with the Colored Division of the National
Youth Administration program, Blayton is credited
with inspiring generations of black CPAs.

GAINING MOMENTUM
With the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964
and the creation of the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission, changes began. In the late
1960s, the AICPA founded the Committee on
Recruitment from Minority Groups. In 1969 the
Journal of Accountancy published the
results of a study, The Black Minority in the CPA
Profession, by committee member Bert N. Mitchell,
CPA, that showed the ratio of blacks in the
accounting profession150 out of 100,000was much
lower than in law or medicine.

Mitchell himself graduated at the top of his
accounting class at the City University of New
York in 1963 and, like many minority CPAs at the
time, gained practical experience working for
small Jewish-owned CPA firms. But upon his
graduation, 25 firms had refused to hire him,
usually attributing their decision to their
clients attitudes, Hammond says. He eventually
found work as the first black employee of J.K.
Lasser and Co., a national accounting firm, and
later founded Mitchell & Titus LLP in New
York.

Firms ultimately did begin hiring
minority CPAs, recruiting at historically black
colleges and universities (HBCUs). Changes were
necessary at these schools, however, because
accreditation by the Association to Advance
Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) requires
that most of a schools faculty have either a PhD
or, in the case of accounting, a combination of a
CPA certificate and an MBA, as well as limits on
the teaching load. Many HBCUs could not meet the
requirement in the 1960s.

With the
help of a $600,000 grant from the Ford Foundation,
CPA Milton Wilson, whose career included teaching
stints at several HBCUs, revamped the Texas
Southern University (TSU) business department,
which had three instructors in 1947, by adding two
full professors, five associate professors and
four assistant professors. In 1967 TSU became the
first HBCU to receive AACSB accreditation.
Wilsons success eventually led him to a position
as the first dean of the Howard University School
of Business, which earned its AACSB accreditation
in 1980, making Wilson the only dean to lead two
HBCUs to AACSB accreditation.

The
AICPA committee on minority recruitment geared two
early programs toward helping HBCUs increase the
number of CPAs and PhDs on their faculties. A
scholarship program provided funds to hire
instructors on an interim basis so that promising
individuals could pursue PhDs in accounting. A
faculty summer seminar, focused on building
teaching skills, served the needs of HBCUs and
institutions with large Hispanic enrollment, and
offered CPE credits and networking opportunities,
says Dan Hobson, AICPA manager of minority
initiatives.

During the late 1960s and
early 1970s, CPAs of color began to form their own
networks. In 1969 the National Association of
Black Accountants (NABA) formed to provide support
for black accountants in public accounting firms
(for information, go to www.nabainc.org
).

A meeting was held in my
living room, recalls NABA founder Frank Ross,
CPA, who would become a managing partner with
KPMG, and nine of us formed the association. The
idea was to help each other achieve success, to
develop a network and foster mentoring. In the
same era, Henry Wilfong started the National
Association of Minority CPA Firms with a $12,000
grant from the Nixon administrations Office of
Minority Business Enterprises. That really was a
catalyst for the rapid growth of minority CPA
firms in the 1970s, because of the many
networking opportunities it offered and its
efforts to get government set-aside work for
minority firms, Mitchell says.

In 1972
CPA Gilbert Vasquez helped found a group to help
Latinos compete for government contracts and
become active on AICPA committees, known today as
the Association of Latino Professionals in Finance
and Accounting (ALPFA). ALPFA ( www.alpfa.org
) currently is developing a Women of ALPFA program
to address the special challenges that face Latino
women. ALPFA CEO Manuel Espinosa says the group
also is encouraging CPAs to become business
leaders and consider pursuing careers as CFOs or
CEOs. The organizations focus on leadership and
professional development is meant to help Latinos
become confident they can be very successful, he
says.

More recently, the National Asian
American Society of Accountants was founded to
strengthen networking opportunities and enhance
Asian Americans influence in the profession, says
founding member Maggie Sun. It includes members of
firms of all sizes and representatives of other
organizations, such as the National Council of
Philippine American Canadian Accountants and the
Chinese American Society of CPAs.

THE PROFESSION'S INITIATIVES While much progress has been made, the
percentage of minority CPAs still remains low. The
AICPAs Supply of Accounting Graduates and
the Demand for Public Accounting Recruits
showed that only 7% of CPAs employed by accounting
firms were minorities, highlighting that we are a
long way from parity, says the AICPAs Hobson.

Over the past three decades, major AICPA
initiatives have included raising awareness about
the CPA profession in minority communities and
increasing the number and visibility of role
models through partnerships with groups such as
INROADS and Management Leadership for
Tomorrowboth of which seek to encourage minority
participation in business. At the same time, the
Institutes Be A Star in Business advertising
initiative and the Start Here. Go Places
recruiting initiative create an effective
combination to expose young people of color to the
accounting profession, Hobson says.

CPAs OF COLOR AS TOMORROW'S BUSINESS
LEADERS Since the days of
Jesse Blayton, accounting faculty members have
served as mentors for minority CPAs. To that end,
the AICPA Fellowships for Minority Doctoral
Students program (
www.aicpa.org/members/ ) seeks to enable
minorities to succeed in the profession and
academia and to increase the number of minority
role models for accounting students.

To help improve the retention of minority CPAs,
Ross, who recently retired from KPMG, is heading
up the new Howard University Center for Accounting
Education, which will study the experiences of
minority CPAs and implement programs based on that
research. It will offer first-year accountants
training focused on the soft skills they will need
to be successful, including working in teams,
building a network and knowing what to expect in
a high-powered environment with high-energy and
high-achieving people around them, says Ross.
There also will be CPA exam and management
training courses.

If you stay longer
in firms you have a better chance to be more
successful, says Ross, who became a KPMG partner
in 1977 and managing partner of the Washington,
D.C., office and the mid-Atlantic area in 1996.
To have a world-class workforce, you have to make
sure you are dealing with the issues facing the
minority groups, he says.

THE
RIGHT THING What will it take
to create change? I see the effort to diversify
the accounting profession as a combination of
initiatives, says George S. Willie, CPA, managing
partner of Bert Smith & Co. in Washington,
D.C., and a member of the AICPA board of
directors. Educators have to be an integral part
of our efforts. There has to be an intensified
outreach program to academia. The families of
minority students must promote commerce,
accounting and finance as alternatives to the
ministry, medicine and law as important
professions. Equally critical is the involvement
of mature and accomplished finance and accounting
professionals. Professionals of ethnic minorities
are clear evidence that with hard work, the right
relationships and the proper focus, there is much
to be attained in the accounting profession.

Change will be in the best interest of the
profession as a whole. Firms will benefit because
striving for diversity is simply the right thing
to do, says Quinton Booker, CPA, professor and
chairman of the accounting department at Jackson
State University, Mississippi. In the long run, I
have never known anything other than good to be
derived from doing the right thing. And firms
serve diverse clients. Diversity in the ranks at
the firm has the potential for a better connection
when offering services to a diverse client base.

The bottom line, says Booker, is that the
profession needs talent to sustain itself.
Professions flourish not because of their ability
to handle todays challenges, although this is
important. Professions flourish when they have the
intellectual capital to anticipate and prepare for
what lies ahead. A well-qualified, diverse
profession will allow us to continue to exist in
the future.

Phaedra Brotherton is
a freelance writer.

Women at Full Throttle

Today, women constitute 30%
of the AICPAs membership, or about
108,000 members, and that percentage
will continue to increase as their
presence in accounting education
programs rises. Women now make up 57% of
accounting graduates and 54% of new
hires in public accounting firms. In
1905, when the profession balked at the
very idea of female CPAs, the story was
much different.

EARLY LEADERS The
first female to pass the CPA examination
was Christine Ross, who sat for the exam
in New York in June 1898. The New York
board of regents debated for 18 months
whether to award Ross a CPA certificate.
The publication Public Accountant
echoed their consternation in a
July 1899 editorial that said, Like all
other innovations, the Examining Boards
in New York and Pennsylvania have to put
up with many difficulties until proper
amendments can be determined on and
passed. This woman affair is only one of
the many pitfalls which could not be
foreseen when the acts were passed.
Ross finally was awarded certificate
number 143 in December 1899.

During World Wars I and II, female CPAs
became important members of the business
world who filled in while their male
counterparts joined the military. Other
historical events also helped womens
entrance into the accounting world. The
Securities Act of 1933 and the
Securities Exchange Act of 1934
increased the demand for accountants to
ensure the publics confidence in
investing in securities and increased
government regulation extended the need
for additional accounting staff.

Since then, the path to success has
been challenging as women pioneered
their skills in executive suites and
boardrooms. Economics and world events
continued to shape womens entre into
the profession and every positive shift
in the economy creating jobs brought an
opportunity for women to claim their
space. But with each downturn, it was
the male breadwinner who typically kept
his job. By 1952 CPA licenses had been
issued to 757 women. While not exactly a
boom for women, it was a step in the
right direction.

FACING HURDLES
Colleges and universities created one
hurdle by not accepting women into their
accounting programs. Linda Bergen,
vice-president of corporate accounting
policy at Citigroup in New York, reports
that her college was not supportive of
her decision to enter the program in
1976. When I was in graduate school for
an MBA in accounting at New York
University, I was told by the placement
director that I would never get a job
with any of the Big 8 accounting firms
because I was a woman, older and had
children. I decided that could not be
correct and that if I worked hard and
did well, I would get job offers. In
fact, I finished first in my class in
accounting and got job offers from all
of the Big 8. This taught me that there
would be lots of naysayers and that to
succeed a woman needs to have excellent
credentials and lots of gumption.

Finding a position that fulfilled
the experience requirement was another
challenge. Ellen Feaver of Montana-based
Anderson ZurMuehlen also faced
disbelievers in her career. One of her
first successes was actually being
hired by Price Waterhouse in 1967 as the
first female CPA in the Washington,
D.C., office, where there were hundreds
of men. This was at a time when national
firm interview booths at the University
of Oklahoma had signs by their sign-up
sheets indicating they did not interview
women. Her career led to various
positions in state government in Montana
and finally to her current role as
consultant with Employee Benefit
Resources LLP, the human resource
division of Anderson ZurMuehlen.

Bergens on-the-job experiences also
were discouraging. I worked for
partners who would repeatedly ask me why
I did not get a normal job, so I could
be home with my family more. My response
to these and other barriers was always
to do excellent work. I thought that
excellence would win over the doubters.
She was right; before long she headed
the public and regulatory reporting
departments at J.P. Morgan & Co.,
where she was responsible for SEC and
Federal Reserve filings, as well as
risk-based capital and analysis of
consolidated financial results. She
subsequently led the accounting policies
department at J.P. Morgan for eight
years, following an 11-year career at
Coopers & Lybrand, specializing in
financial institutions.

Titles VII and IX of the Civil Rights
Act, the Equal Employment Opportunity
Act and the Equal Pay Act all enhanced
opportunities for women in the business
world. Ultimately, 1986 marked the year
in which women accounting graduates
first made up 50% of graduating classes.

Both Bergen and Feaver have
advice for new CPAs. Feaver suggests:
Understand who you are and what your
goals are. If a female CPA has talent
and works hard, the pathways to success
are many. You can have the kind of
career you wish. You can equip yourself
to pursue the job you want. Dont be shy
about asking for opportunities and
experiences.

Bergen
cautions: While there is a level
playing field for women entering the
accounting profession today, they still
may find inequities at higher levels.
Because of the population dynamics (that
is, an aging workforce and a higher
proportion of women in the workforce and
in accounting majors in business
schools), the profession is forced to
value the women they employ and look for
ways to keep them. This gives women some
leverage in negotiating working
conditions that can enable them to
balance their work and personal lives.

FORGING THE WAY The AICPA is dedicated to
enhancing the success of women CPAs. In
1989, the board of directors appointed a
special committee to recommend
strategies to strengthen the upward
mobility of professional women in public
accounting, industry, government and
academe. The special committee has
evolved into todays AICPA Work/Life and
Womens Initiatives Executive Committee,
which focuses on promoting a culture
within the accounting profession of
work/life effectiveness and the
retention and development of women.

The committees list of
accomplishments include

Surveying the
profession from 1993 to the present to
track trends in womens advancement and
employment and work/life policies.

Two
best-selling editions of Promoting
Your Talent: A Guidebook for Women and
Their Firms, by Nancy Baldiga,
and numerous articles.

Conferences,
such as the AICPA Womens Summit.

Working with
state CPA societies in Illinois and New
Mexico to honor Women to Watch.

Producing
work/life videos.

Developing a
brochure, Mentoring Program
Guidelines.

This
month the AICPA will install its third
female chair, Leslie Murphy of Plante
& Moran, Southfield, Mich., another
indication of the AICPAs commitment to
valuing women in the profession. The
number of women serving on public
company boards (which rose to 13.6% in
2003 from 9.6% in 1995) and in corporate
executive ranks (which jumped to 15.7%
in 2003 from 8.7% in 1995) is a tribute
to women pioneers such as Feaver and
Bergen. They did the hard work of
forging the way for all women CPAs who
followed by breaking down barriers and
gaining admiration and respect.

Barbara Vigilante

BARBARA VIGILANTE is manager of
work/life and womens initiatives at the
AICPA. Ms. Vigilante is an employee of
the AICPA and her views, as expressed
above, do not necessarily reflect the
views of the Institute. Official
positions are determined through certain
specific committee procedures, due
process and deliberation.

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